SEO Advice

Here is a list of things NOT to do when it comes to search engine optimization:

• Don’t do anything that tries to trick the search engines in ranking your site higher
• Put text in the same color as the background color. Not only does this make your site look like its keyword spamming but search engines can usually pick up on this and will penalize your web site.
• List keywords anywhere but the keywords meta tag. There aren’t very many legitimate reasons to do this and search engines will usually penalize you for doing this.
• Create multiple pages of the same content and try and have this indexed (or manually submit this) in the search engines. Search engines can detect when content matches other pages on your web site.
• Submit a web page more than once to a search engine within 24 hours. If its a directory such as DMOZ, then don’t try and submit your site more than once every 3 or 4 weeks.
• Use keywords that don’t relate to your web site

If you have multiple web sites and domains, consider using domain privacy to hide your contact details. There are several reasons for this:

• Hide information from your competitors and SEOs looking to steal ideas from your network of websites
• Google knows all, they have been a domain registrar since 2005 and have easy access to domain contact information. If you are linking between your multiple domains, don’t let Google know all the sites are the same owner by simply hiding the domain contact information.

You might also consider using different web hosts, dns servers and domain registratrs as well to keep as many of your domains as unique as possible.

If you are looking to start a new site, you may want to investigate purchasing a used domain that already has an existing web site on it. If the web site and domain is more than a year old, you can avoid the dreaded google sandbox and most likely rank quicker for your targeted keyphrases. One large company that sells used domains is sedo.com but there are numerous others as well.

This might not be a startling revelation of any kind, but just revalidates how critical being part of trusted neighborhoods and having strong linking from established, related sites. You can tell how well Google trusts the content of your web site by how deep Google will spider and index your web site.

Check your web logs and see what Googlebot is doing. Is it spidering deep within your site? Does a site:www.yourdomain.com query on Google display only your home page? If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that there is a low trustiness factor from Google and it just doesn’t think your site is very important.

If your site is new, then you probably know why this is happening. Go and get some backlinks to your site. If your site is established, then you probably have a problem some where. Maybe you are involved in some bad neighborhoods that Google has little respect for. Dump your reciprocal link programs, get some good content and start getting legitimate links to your web site. Easier said than done, but this is the foolproof solution.

This tip helps usability for humans and search engine spiders alike: make sure that every web page is no more than 2 clicks deep in your web site. By that I mean, a web page should never be more than two clicks away from every other web page on your web site. This is usually the case for most web sites because they will have a consistent footer with main links and one of those links will be to the site map which has a link to every single page.

One search engine optimization step for web sites that is often overlooked is to use keywords as your anchor text when linking to other pages in your web site. Anchor text are the words are actually linked and you click on when following a link.

For instance, lets say your web site focuses on mortgages. Instead of linking to your home page with the standard “Home” as your anchor text, use “Mortgages” instead. For this tip, its nice to have a text link based footer with no graphics which is usually below the fold and designed more for search engine spiders and not human visitors.

Google has a neat tool that allows you to insert keywords and it will provide keyphrases based on the keywords you entered and tell you the competition for these keyphrases in their AdWords program and the amount of search traffic they can garner. The tool is very useful for finding related keyphrases that aren’t very competitive but are worth targeting because they get a significant number of searches.

Another obvious tip but it never hurts to point out everything. Make sure you assign unique, keyword rich and descriptive title tags for every web page on your site. The title tag content should mimic keywords that actually exist in the web page content.

Google accounts for approximately 50-90% of search engine traffic. On sites that I have been involved with, this number seems to average around 75-80% of total search engine traffic. Based on these numbers, I would focus exclusively on optimizing your web site for Google and not pay too much attention to Yahoo or MSN.

Its not like we’ve solved any big mysteries here, it is a well known fact in web development circles that using flash can negatively impact search engine traffic because search engine crawlers cannot read or spider flash content.

If you must use flash, make sure you have a text based navigation if you are using a flash based navigation system. If you have flash based content, create an alternate html version and block the flash version from search engine spiders using your web site’s robots.txt file.

I was asked the other day for advice for a new web site trying to get established in the search engines. I thought I would share them with you as I think they are valuable for all new web sites:

Focus on great content, less on useability
Don’t get me wrong, useability is important but great web sites that are popular with users and search engines alike are usually because they have good content. You can always tweak and enhance useability later on. Initially, you won’t have many visitors or traffic so it will be important to build out your site with as much targetted keyword content as possible.

Simple and clean, no fancy graphics
Keep the site clean and simple, use the kiss principle. Most successful sites on the web have a simple and clean design.

Lots of internal links
Make sure your web pages are well linked internally; you want to make it as easy as possible for spiders to crawl your web site. As well, a well internally linked web site has a better chance of registering its own pages as backlinks. Make sure you have a site map that includes a link to every page on your site. If you can, link to every single page from each page within your web site.

Register your domain for several years
Not only does an extended registration length protect your brand and identity but its also a positive sign from Google that you are serious about your web site and can improve your Pagerank.

Bribe a webmaster to link to your site who has related content with a good PR (pagerank) and backlinks
OK, we are not actually condoning bribery, but simply making a point (tongue in cheek) that having an established site point to your web site is so important. The link will be followed by all the big search engine spiders and start to index your web site without having to manually add your url to their index. As well, it will count as a vote or the linking web site vouching for your new site and give you some instant credibility.

Remember, making a good site that is ranked well and gets search engine traffic is not easy and doesn’t happen over night. Keep adding great content and continue working at it day in and day out and it will eventually pay off.

Most webmasters know that it’s important to have a text based footer with links to main sections. This is a good idea for a couple reasons: it provides actual text that the search engine spiders such as googlebot can read and associate with the page it links to and also provides a link to your main pages from every single page. Along these lines, its also key to have a site map that includes a link to every page in your site. This is where most sites stop in terms of internal linking but this is just the beginning.

Your site should be well linked internally before you bother spending time on link popularity and backlinks from external web sites. Its a lot easier to make your site well linked internally than it is to get other sites to link to you; start with easy stuff that you have full control over.

If you use blog software, it can be very easy to increase internal linking with a little effort:

• Have a list of popular search keywords or phrases, put these on each page and link to the search results (assuming your blog has a search function)
• Setup tags and/or categories and classify your blog entries - make sure the tag list and categories show up on every page (for an example of tags, look at this site on the right hand navigation)
• Create a “related articles” blurb for each article - most blogs will either support this feature or have a plugin to support it

Not only will these improve your internal linking within your blog but they will also make navigation easier for your readers.

All the ideas suggested here are very simple examples. How you increase your internal site linking depends on your web site and the content. The point is merely to suggest basic ideas that many sites could employ and get you thinking about more complex ways to optimize your site.

This tip applies especially to blogging but also any web site writing. Its a good idea to check the primary subject’s keywords in Overture’s keyword tool to get suggestions of keywords to incorporate into your article. This is particularly effective for high traffic keywords.

For example, let say you are writing on a topic such as poker. Maybe your article is more specific than a general keyword like poker but you are going to type in poker because its broad and will give you the most suggestions. The results will not only show you related keyphrases with the word poker in them but also the keyphrase’s popularity of how many times it was searched for in the last month.

Its a well known fact that Google looks at URLs when determining keyphrase relevance to the web pages in your site. Always use hyphens and not underscores in your URLs. This includes files names and directories. The reason why is because Google disregards underscores (_) but interprets hyphens (-) as a space.

So if you had a web page all about search engine marketing, you would name the file like this:

search-engine-marketing.html

And not

search_engine_marketing.html

The latter example with the underscores is interpreted as searchenginemarketing whereas the example with the hyphens is seen as search engine marketing.

There is a lot of talk about the Google sandbox these days in the blogosphere and various SEO and SEM related web sites. First of all, what is it? Well, quite simply, the Google sandbox is the equivilent of search engine purgatory where new sites exist for up to a year. During their sad existance in the sandbox, they don’t rank (or rank well) for keyphrases that they should. Why does the sandbox exist? Its believed that it’s there to prevent new, mainly spammy sites from popping up and ranking well right away. It forces sites to have to earn their rankings by waiting a while.

The thing about the sandbox is that there is no real way to avoid it. Most sites fall in no matter what kind of quality links they have pointing their way.

There is one loophole: it appears as though keywords or keyphrases that exist in your domain name will rank well even though others do not. This site is a great example. It is new (just over a month old) and and does not rank at all for any seo related keyphrases. Although suprisingly enough, it ranks 11th in Google for seo advice.

A couple quick tips on URLs. According to Matt Cutts blog, you should minimize the number of url querystring parameters to 1 or 2. What is a URL querystring parameter. Well, these are the parameters after the pagename and ? in a URL such as (in bold):

http://www.mydomain.com/mypage.php?cid=234&fid=24334

As well, do not use ID=something as a parameter. I plan on talking about URL rewriting in the near future which is the ideal way to hide all parameters and make your site more search engine friendly.

One way to help increase search engine traffic to your web site is by installing a blog on your web site. Most web site operators are knowledgable about a specific subject associated with their web site. If this scenario applies to you, it may be beneficial to start a blog where you can offer advice, news or tips on your field of interest that is relevant to your web site.

This can be a great way to boost the “keyword fodder” for your site by increasing the number of pages within your website, internal links, and relevant keyword-ed content that your site targets.

Make sure you install the blog within your web site if you want to maximize its impact. For instance, do not create a new hostname for the blog such as “blog.yourdomain.com” but use a subdirectory such as “www.yourdomain.com/blog”. Put a link to your new blog on every page of your web site if you can to make sure the search engines pick it up.

Having an animated under contruction man digging on the front page of your web site is an obvious no-no. Make sure you have some content before telling the world about your new web site or starting a search engine marketing program. Try and fill in your blog with some posts and get some content rolling before you link to your new site or begin promoting it. Remember first impressions are the most important and spiders or real people will not be impressed with your web site skeleton even with a slick design. Content matters, the rest is fluff.

When building your pages, avoid embedding CSS style and javascript in your web pages. Instead, put the CSS and Javascript in an external file.

The reason why you should do this is because search engines tend to give more weight to content at the top of the page than to text that appears further down on a page. By removing CSS or javascript content and putting it into an external file, you are effectively moving your content to more prominent placement.

If you don’t want Google or other search engines to count outbound links, use the nofollow tag in the html of your link. Here is an excerpt from Google’s blog:

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

Google Blog Post

When you hire an SEO company to optimize your web site and help improve your rankings, choose one that you have good communication with and that will explain to you exactly what steps they are taking to optimize your site.

There are a couple key reasons for this. First of all, it makes business sense. You should know what your hard earned dollars are being spent on. All too often, search engine optimization firms operate as a “black magic” entity charming snakes in a backroom to get your web site a higher search engine ranking. In actuality, the only optimization they have ever done is submit your site to Yahoo and the occasional web site change. Maybe the money spent doesn’t have as much value anymore when you know the specifics of what they have done.

The most critical reason is that you are ultimately responsible for any illicit practices that your SEO firm uses. If they use keyword stuffing or cloaking (more on these later) and your web site gets removed from Google, ultimately its your business that suffers. Imagine the scenario where traffic completely disapears from one of the major search engines; this has the potential to destroy your business. An example of this was with Traffic-Power.com who was de-listed from Google (and most if not all of their SEO clients).

Search engine optimization firms play an important role but you should be wary of their practices. Some operate on the up and up, some use black hat methods. Always know what your SEO firm is doing at all times and make them provide you with a synopsis of any optimization they do.

When desiging your web site, try and keep the directory structure as simply and high level as possible. Do not embed your content deep in a folder structure more than a couple nested folders. If possible and you have a simple site, try and keep all your web pages in the root directory.

This is because Google prioritizes content based on folder level. All other things being equal, a web page in the root of your web site is seen as more important as a web page nested a folder or more deep.

One seo tip that is often overlooked is domain name registration length. Google looks to see how long a domain name is registered and will give you a higher pagerank because of it. If you are committed to your web site and Internet presence then there is no reason why you can’t justify registering your domain name for 5 or 10 years. Not only will this give you a boost in Google but it will also secure your web identity for years to come and avoid having to renew your domain year after year.